Making an exhibition of herself ?
Student barred from the Musee d’Orsay... because her dress was too low-cut
A WOMAN visitor to a Paris art museum reacted with fury after being ordered to cover up her cleavage before going in.
The humiliating request from a security guard came as the student – who asked to be identified by her first name Jeanne – visited the Musee d’Orsay, which is packed with paintings and sculptures celebrating the female form.
The 22-year-old said male staff surrounded her as she stood in the queue on a sweltering hot day, and all appeared to be staring at her breasts.
Jeanne had just had lunch at Le Meurice, a five-star hotel, and had worn the dress there without any problems. She and a friend then visited the Orsay, which houses the largest collection of Impressionist masterpieces in the world.
But at the entrance a security guard apparently told Jeanne: ‘Put on your jacket, so I [can] let you in... it is the rules.’
Afterwards she wrote online: ‘Today I was the victim, in front of a witness, of sexist discrimination based on my physique and my clothes at the entrance of the Orsay National Museum.’
One man was said to have used the words ‘Calm down, Madam!’, and it was not until she put a jacket over her designer dress that she was finally let in.
Jeanne wrote on Twitter: ‘Inside [are] paintings of naked women, sculptures of naked women, I am not just my breasts, I am not just a body, your double standards should not be an obstacle to my right of access to culture and knowledge.’
Famous risque paintings in the Orsay include Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s The Source. The museum said it ‘deeply regrets the incident’.